Maxime de la Rocheterie on Marie-Antoinette

"She was not a guilty woman, neither was she a saint; she was an upright, charming woman, a little frivolous, somewhat impulsive, but always pure; she was a queen, at times ardent in her fancies for her favourites and thoughtless in her policy, but proud and full of energy; a thorough woman in her winsome ways and tenderness of heart, until she became a martyr."

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

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Saturday, May 31, 2014

This time the shooter is 22-year-old Elliot Rodger. Like clockwork,
the cry goes up blaming the National Rifle Association and calling for
tougher gun laws. But this time there’s a problem for believers in gun
control. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Law Center
to Prevent Gun Violence gave an “A-” to California's gun control laws,
passed as they were by one of the most liberal state governments in the
country.

On December 9, 2013 — barely six months ago — the Los Angeles Times was pleased to report the following, beginning with this headline:

California has toughest gun control laws in country, study finds

SACRAMENTO — California has the toughest gun control laws in the
nation, receiving an A- grade in a state-by-state analysis by the Brady
Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Law Center to Prevent Gun
Violence.

In the year after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy
Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, eight states, including
California, passed “major gun reforms,” said Amanda Wilcox, the
legislation and policy chair for the California Brady Campaign to
Prevent Gun Violence.

“A record 11 bills were signed into law, including measures to keep
guns out of dangerous hands and closing loopholes in California’s law
prohibiting large capacity magazines,” Wilcox said. “The research shows
that strong gun laws can keep people safe from gun violence. We know
that California’s strong gun laws are saving lives.”

Now comes young Mr. Rodger, who went on a shooting spree near the UC
campus in Santa Barbara, killing seven, including himself, and wounding
thirteen others. So what happened? Well, California’s strong gun laws
most assuredly did not “keep people safe from gun violence.”

It’s understandable that the grief-stricken father of one of the
victims would lash out, in this case at the NRA. But the hard fact here
is that California — a state that is run from top to bottom by liberal
Democrats — did exactly what gun control advocates asked. Not to put too
fine a point on it, but the Elliot Rodger shooting illustrates exactly
the point of gun law critics. It isn’t the gun, it’s the person. In
fact, three of the victims were not shot — they were stabbed to death.

Elliot Rodger was mentally ill. His own family had alerted authorities that they were concerned about their son. The Washington Postreported it this way:

Rodger, who police say fatally shot himself after his killing
spree Friday, had been receiving treatment for years from several
psychologists and counselors. Last month, the 22-year-old wrote, his
mother was so concerned about his well-being after seeing some of his
videos on YouTube that she contacted mental-health officials, who
dispatched sheriff’s deputies to check on him at his apartment in Isla
Vista, an enclave near the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Had the officers sensed something awry during their April 30 visit,
they might have searched Rodger’s home. They would have found his three
semiautomatic handguns, dozens of rounds of ammunition and a draft of
his 137-page memoir-manifesto.
They would have read about his plot for a “Day of Retribution” — when,
as Rodger wrote, he planned to “kill everyone in Isla Vista, to utterly
destroy that wretched town.”

But the deputies did not look. They concluded that Rodger seemed
“quiet and timid… polite and courteous,” Santa Barbara County Sheriff
Bill Brown said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

3 comments:

Stupidity will defeat any policy or law. You would really think that when Rodgers' concerned parents called the police, that the responding officers would have at least checked the database of weapons owners that the state of CA maintains. If the police had done that easy, small thing, they would have known to search his room when they responded to his parents' desperate call

The mental health issue is another thing. Like nearly every mass shooter since the U of Texas shootings in the 60s, this killer was in psychiatric care and had been for a long time. He was moreover taking prescription psychotropic drugs, as had nearly other mass shooter over the past 45 years. Could these drugs, whose known side affects include suicidal ideation and behavior, and aggressive tendencies, have been the major factor in these rampages?

Seems to me that many of our experts and pundits are asking the wrong questions.

Really cannot ,from Australia,understand America's obsession with guns.We had 35 killed in a massacre in 1996,then we introduced tough gun laws. We too started out as a frontier nation ,with outlaws ( called bushrangers) but perhaps because we had established police forces,that may have reduced a lot of the vigilante ism that seems to be part and parcel of the Old West.However outlaw Motorcycle gangs try to smuggle weapons but police seem to have good intelligence. My heart went out to Mr Martinez who laid the blame at various groups.

Exactly, NC. Gervase, if banning guns completely would stop so many violent incidents in the USA then I would be all for it. But places with the strictest gun control laws have had some of the worst massacres because of mentally ill persons.

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